A variety of mechanisms are available to help users search and navigate electronic information. For example, many electronic resources employ a search engine to help users locate information. To locate information on a particular topic, a search engine allows users to submit one or more search query terms related to a topic of interest. In response, the search engine executes the search query, consults its indexes, and generates information about the results of the search. The information about the results of the search, referred to herein as the “search results,” usually contains a list of resources that satisfy the search query and some attributes of those sources.
For example, the search engine's index might associate, with each particular keyword in a known universe of keywords, a set of web pages (identified potentially by the Universal Resource Locators (URLs) of those web pages) that were previously discovered (e.g., by an automated web crawler program) to contain at least one instance of that particular keyword. When a user enters a query that includes the particular keyword, the search engine may generate the search results at least in part by locating the keyword in the index and determining the set of web pages that are associated with that keyword. The search engine may determine a separate set in like manner for each separate keyword that occurs in a user-submitted query, and then determine the intersection of the sets (which will be the set of web pages that include all of the query's keywords) in order to determine which search results ought to be presented on the search results page that the search engine returns to the user in response to the submission of the query to the search engine. In generating the search results page, the search engine may rank and order the search results to be presented based on relevance, for example (which might be determined based at least in part on the frequencies, locations, or contexts of the queries' keywords within the web pages within which those keywords are found), such that search results deemed to be more relevant to the query are positioned or otherwise displayed more prominently (e.g., earlier or higher up) in the search results page than are other search results deemed to be less relevant to the query.
More sophisticated search engines often include, along with one or more of the search results shown on the search results page, “quick links” that point to specific destinations within the web site to which search results refer. For example, when a search result for the “Yahoo!” web site appears, along with a link to a general home page for “Yahoo!” the search results may include quick links to: mail, messenger, games, music, answers, maps, etc. These quick links help to enable a user to “jump” directly to the content in which he is specifically interested, so that the user does not need to navigate first to the general home page of the web site in search for links, from that home page, to other pages that feature the content in which he is specifically interested. This saves the user time and effort.
However, the presence of these quick links on the search results page can also complicate and crowd the search results page. The presence of these quick links can force other search results further down onto the search results page, or even onto a subsequent search results page that the user might or might not view. Therefore, when quick links in which the user is not likely to be interested are presented along with a search result, the display of those quick links can produce a net detriment rather than a net benefit on the user's search experience.
The more complicated a search results page becomes, the less likely it is that a user will notice that the search results page already contains a search result that matches what the user is looking for with a high degree of precision. When such a search result is “buried” within a tangle of other information, the user might simply enter a new query into the search engine query box after reading the first two or three search results, rather than scanning further down the page for the search result that would truly satisfy the user's information desire. The user might repeat this behavior several times before submitting, to the search engine, a query that causes the interesting search result to appear prominently enough on a search result page that the user selects it and remains at it for a significant amount of time. The user might not be aware that the same interesting search result also previously appeared on one or more of the search result pages that the user previously received from the search engine. Thus, the user wastes time and effort finding a resource that he could have reached earlier, had that resource been more prominently featured on a prior search results page.
The approaches described in the section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.